Sun | Enterprise 10000 Server

Introduced in March 1997, the Enterprise 10000 – also referred to as the E10K - was one of Sun’s most successful products ever brought to market.

Code named “Starfire”, the Enterprise 10000 was largely designed by Cray Research's Business Systems Division as a successor to the Cray Superserver 6400, itself related to Sun's earlier Sun-4d architecture servers. After Cray was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996, this division was sold on to Sun, who then launched the Starfire as the Ultra Enterprise 10000 in 1997.

Sun corporate lore says that Silicon Graphics would have sold the division to Sun for a tenth of the price they paid for it, and Sun saw so much potential in it that they would have paid Silicon Graphics ten times its final purchase price to acquire it.

The Enterprise 10000 used 4 to 64 UltraSPARC-II CPUs with speeds being 250, 336, 400, or 466 MHz, and had a maximum memory capacity of 1,024 Gigabytes.

The E10K was also the physically largest server Sun had produced to date, being 70” tall, 38.25” wide, 50” deep, and weighing approximately 2000 lbs. The shipping containers for the E10K were rumored to cost $30,000 each, and were shock and humidity controlled. Many of the Enterprise 10000 systems, when fully configured, sold for more than $1,000,000.

The E10K was EOL’d (end-of-lifed) in April 2003, and there was no machine specified as its replacement, though Sun by that time had introduced both the Sun Fire 12K and Sun Fire 15K.

Wikipedia has a small article about the Enterprise 10000 which can be viewed here.